Carnivorous Tulips

– Generative Art, DreamStudio, Dall-E 2

Using Stability.ai’s DreamStudio Beta, I was finally able to get some cool results by tweaking some settings. While I wasn’t able to get the petals to turn into fangs, DreamStudio recognized the carnivorous plant references I added to the prompt and integrated them into the main flower.

Prompt: dream of a carnivorous tulip with fangs, extremely detailed, hyper realistic, a tulip with teeth like a venus flytrap, feeding on prey, petals have water droplets sundew dripping down, cfgScale: 15

Turns out, the variations technique I use with [[ Dall-E 2 ]] doesn’t work well with DreamStudio! Once I changed the settings to generate just 1 image, I started getting much better results. On my previous DreamStudio attempt, I changed to 4 images, thinking it would be like Dall-E. Nope!

I found it’s better to generate just one image and go all in on diffusion and Cfg—putting more pressure on you to create a good prompt.

Redreaming

As I continued to increase the cfg and diffusion values in each Redream, I saw more detail being generated for the same prompt.

DreamStudio has a “Redream” feature you can access through the “History” tab.

Prompt: dream of a carnivorous tulip, colored pencil drawing, extremely detailed, botanical drawing, a tulip whose petals are a venus flytrap mouth, redreamed twice

More Attempts

Prompt: a carnivorous tulip, cfgScale: 7

Prompt: a carnivorous tulip, cfgScale: 0

Prompt: dream of a carnivorous tulip, colored pencil drawing, extremely detailed, botanical drawing, a tulip whose petals are a venus flytrap mouth, cfgScale: 7

Prompt: dream of a carnivorous tulip, colored pencil drawing, extremely detailed, botanical drawing, a tulip whose petals are teeth of a venus flytrap, cfgScale: 10

Prompt: dream of a carnivorous tulip, extremely detailed, hyper realistic, a tulip with teeth like a venus flytrap, feeding on prey, petals have water droplets sundew dripping down, cfgScale: 20

cfgScale: 20 was hit or miss. Redreaming the blurry ones just regenerated out of focus images! :(

Prompt: dream of a carnivorous tulip, colored pencil drawing, extremely detailed, botanical drawing, a tulip whose petals are a venus flytrap mouth with glistening teeth, cfgScale: 20

The leaves have teeth!

I found quite a few I liked, which I can upscale with Photoshop’s new Neural Filters.

Dall-E Variations

I wanted to try to create variations of my favorites in Dall-E and see if I could get a cool series going. First, I tried a very vague prompt without descriptors to see how Dall-E interprets this as a baseline. It seems to assume carnivorous plants are always pitcher plants!

Prompt: a carnivorous tulip

Next, I tried the prompt from the top of this post, with the super realistic and funky weird generations.

Prompt: dream of a carnivorous tulip with fangs, extremely detailed, hyper realistic, a tulip with teeth like a venus flytrap, feeding on prey, petals have water droplets sundew dripping down

I hid two of the generations because they were terrifying.

I liked DreamStudio’s interpretation of this more—if you scroll to the top of this page, you’ll see that it really nailed the photorealism. By contrast, Dall-E’s generations for this prompt had that trademark “AI generated collage” look.

Variation of Image 4 from the previous prompt. I was hoping for more realism—silly me, I forgot that Dall-E typically gets more abstract and painting-like with each generation.

This is getting terrifying, so I’m moving on to a different prompt now!

Prompt: dream of a carnivorous tulip, colored pencil drawing, extremely detailed, botanical drawing, a tulip whose petals are a venus flytrap mouth

I absolutely love the direction this went in. It’s fully zoomed out, the tulip itself has transformed to a venus flytrap hybrid, and all the tendrils around it are taking the form of axes, lungs, some sort of weaponized uterus even? Awesome.

Comparing the same prompt between DreamStudio (left) and Dall-E 2 (right).

Prompt: dream of a carnivorous tulip, colored pencil drawing, extremely detailed, botanical drawing, a tulip whose petals are a venus flytrap mouth

Uploading DreamStudio images

By inputting my favorite DreamStudio generations, I’m hoping to generate some stylistically similar images!

Dall-E made this one look less realistic than DreamStudio.

This one ended up looking pretty cool! Still, we’re losing details by putting it through Dall-E.

Again, losing detail, but the fourth one actually looks pretty good.

Zooming in on the details here, this looks absolutely insane. Dall-E loves to create people in the most unexpected places. The dewdrop in the image at the right looks a bit like a person, poised for action, right?

ENHANCE! (With Photoshop Neural Filters)

These are all too similar! I wanted Dall-E to come up with something radically different. They’re even all framed in the same exact way.

These tulip buds look a bit pointier than real ones, maybe it picked up on the carnivorous teeth bit from DreamStudio?

Edits

  • Photoshop Neural Filters
    • Super Zoom
    • Depth Blur
  • Content Aware Fill
  • Good ol’ Sharpen + Noise Filters

Content Aware Fill is great to extend the background and re-crop

That’s it for today!

Here are all the notes in this garden, along with their links, visualized as a graph.